Emeritus Prof. Dr. Günay Kut: The ʿAvnî Dîvân (Fatih Sultan Mehmed) (1432–1481)

Sultan Mehmed, who conquered Constantinople in 1453 at the age of twenty-one, subsequently received the epithet Fatih (“the Conqueror”). He was also a poet and left behind a Dîvân. The Dîvân was first published in 1904 by Georg Jacob in Berlin. Three manuscript copies attributed to Fatih are extant today, all of which are preserved in the Ali Emiri Collection of the Millet Manuscript Library (Ali Emiri, Manzum 305, 530, 531). Jacob’s printed edition incorporates the poems found in a miscellany held at Uppsala University Library, as well as those transmitted in Ata Tarihi and in the Tezkire compilations of Sehî, Latîfî, and Hasan Çelebi.

The Dîvân has been published four times:

• Sıtkı Bilmen, Istanbul 1944
• Kemal Edip Ünsel, Fatih’in Şiirleri, Ankara: TTK, 1946
• Ahmed Aymutlu, Fatih Şiirleri, Istanbul: MEB, 1992
• İskender Pala, „Şair Fatih“ In: İstanbul Armağanı, Bd. 1: Fetih ve Fatih, Istanbul: Büyükşehir Belediyesi, 1995, S. 283–322.

The manuscript Ali Emiri, Manzum 305 contains 26 folios (1b–22b) and comprises a total of 70 poems. The Dîvân begins directly with the ghazals. The observations of Ali Emiri, who worked extensively on the manuscript, are significant for scholarship; in his evaluations he also considers the manuscripts numbered 530 and 531.

Fatih’s poetry reveals a markedly realistic disposition. Two couplets that illustrate this worldview are:

Sâḳiyâ mey vir ki bir gün lâlezâr elden gider /
Çün irür faṣl-ı ḫazân bâġ-ı bahâr elden gider.
Her niçe zühd ü ṣalâḥa mâyil olur ḫâtırum /
Gördügümce ol nigârı ihtiyâr elden gider.
(Millet Yazmalar Kütüphanesi, Ali Emiri 305, fol. 8a)

Short Biography

Emeritus Prof. Dr. Günay Kut was born in 1939 in Bayburt. She graduated from the Department of Turkish Language and Literature at Istanbul University in 1961 with a thesis on Zâtî’s Şem u Pervâne. In 1965 she completed her PhD under the supervision of Ali Nihad Tarlan with a critical edition of Ali Şîr Nevâʾî’s Ġarâʾibü’s-Ṣıġar. In 1982 she obtained the title of Associate Professor with her study and edition of the variant manuscripts of Sehî Beg’s tezkire Heşt Behişt.

She taught at Istanbul University and at the University of Chicago (Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Civilizations). At Boğaziçi University she founded the Department of Turkish Language and Literature and served as its chair. In 2006 she retired from Boğaziçi University, which awarded her the title of Emeritus Professor.

She is among the founding editors of the Journal of Turkish Studies, published by Harvard University. She has authored nearly 30 books, more than 200 articles, over 100 national and international conference papers, and has supervised numerous MA and PhD theses. She has also made major contributions to the cataloguing of manuscript collections in Turkey.

In 2024 she received the Presidential Grand Award for Culture and Arts in the category of Science and Culture, together with her sister, Prof. Dr. Gönül Tekin. She donated her personal library to the Rami Library, where it now serves researchers as the “Günay-Turgut Kut Specialized Collection.” She continues her scholarly work to this day.

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